There's a tan metal storage building in the cheap-rent part of town where the Christmas banners and lighted wreaths that hang on street lamps for a month and a bit each year are stored the rest of the time, and Cliff knew where it was. It ruined the magic, were street lamp decorations able to contain any, to see them rolled and stacked up in the dusty dark, emptied of their Christmas spirits, which must migrate in great, invisible flocks to the north pole or some gingerbread town in Germany each January 1st. But then, he hadn't felt the magic of Christmas—at least not from a street lamp decoration—since he was a kid.

No older than 10 but probably younger, sitting in the back seat of the family Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra with his brother and sister. He had his nose against the cold window unless it was his turn to sit in the middle, looking up at the shining tinsel shapes on the street lamps. They had a game. When they passed a light pole bearing two silver tinsel bells, for example, he and his siblings would sing the first few lines of Jingle Bells. A green tinsel Christmas tree, O Christmas Tree. An angel, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and so on. He reflected that they never figured out a song for the candy cane.

But that was a different time and a different town, and instead of a kid in an Oldsmobile, he was a middle-aged man in a bucket truck mounting a wreath to a streetlight on another 65-degree December day in Texas. There weren't any Christmas songs about wreaths that he knew of.

II.

'Twas the Friday before Christmas, and all through the bar, adults of moderate ages were greeting each other, holding typical holiday gift bags with tissue paper poking out of the tops. The men wore dark jeans and some wore caps. The ladies wore stilettos and jeans and black-and-red plaid or sparkly golden tops under fake leather jackets, their curling irons likely still warm in their bathroom sinks. A heavier man spoke loudly and laughed at his own jokes while a younger, better looking couple nursed their drinks and looked politely attentive. Somewhere in a back room, aluminum trays of catering warmed over Sterno cans. White elephant would be played there later, and the loud, heavy man will have brought an inappropriate gift that two of the slightly younger men will fight over as a joke.

Someone's girlfriend had on a vanilla ice cream sweater with a loose knit that hinted at her bra and midriff as she carried drinks in both hands back to the group. A black-capped boyfriend met her halfway to collect his. A black-haired woman with dark lipstick, a black waxed jacket, black jeans and black high-heeled boots ordered a very pale blonde beer. The loud man was still holding court at the bar with the better looking couple, keeping the three of them from the party while the bartenders leaned together and chatted on the other side of the counter. The music was very normal background music that had nothing to do with the season, the party in the back room or the 12-foot Christmas tree glowing in the corner.

III.

The aisles were jammed with the upper middle class, young, stay-at-home moms in designer activewear gazing up to the highest shelves while her truly cute boy or girl in the seat of the cart looks at her or the shelves or the other shoppers until reaching with both hands toward some treat he or she is unlikely to get. Is there a quota for the number of times a good mom must say 'no' in a grocery store?

A young hispanic woman in a hairnet sets out a basket of small pieces of pannettone as free samples, and an old man takes a piece with his bare fingers, ignoring the hygienic plastic tongs lying on top. The bread tastes of sugar and orange, and the free-sample butter is full of crumbs from the overeager.

One is either bumped or blocked by the carts of the entitled, myriad nobodies with their noses in the air while Michael Buble croons Christmas songs approvingly. One hides oneself behind a display of Christmas ale to escape the current of self-absorbed shoppers collecting ingredients for some holiday meal that only a small number of people will taste or care about. This, a tradition-rich time of year, means the store is swimming with the must-havers, and it can be dangerous to go against the current. They simply must have that certain brand of pasta sauce or cut of beef or bottle of wine or loaf of sweet bread or summer sausage that no one really likes but is served every year and therefore must be served this year, too.

IV.

There's a yellow Lamborghini taking up two parking spaces outside a vacant sports bar that's in the process of being taken over by a climbing gym. Meanwhile, several homeless men sit on the courthouse steps, their possessions below: a jacket, a new black suitcase and an old vacuum cleaner. There are snowflake decals on the diner windows and a white man with black dreadlocks past his waist ducks into the tattoo parlor across the street, which is open on a Sunday morning for some reason. There's a man wearing a santa hat and two women with purple hair. I soak the condensation from my water glass into a napkin and have a sudden urge to watch The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, but it fades quickly without completely going away.

I haven't watched any Christmas movies or specials this year except for tuning out half of Charlie Brown before turning it off to go for a walk instead. I did go see The Nutcracker though. I remember the BBC version they used to play on PBS every year when I was a kid. To me, it was just as exciting as Rudolph or Frosty or driving around to look at Christmas lights because it, like all the rest of them, signaled the impending arrival of presents. I no longer look forward to presents because I'm an adult who, more or less, buys what I want throughout the year. Maybe that's why I'm unmoved by TV specials and Christmas music on the radio and snowflake decals on diner windows.

V.

He was six years old and visiting his grandmother for Christmas in one of the huge, columned houses in the rich, old part of town where the yards are immaculate and the sidewalks buckle and break above the vast root systems of trees four stories high. Presently, he was hiding beneath the ancient, enormous magnolia tree in his grandmother's front yard, its bottom-most branches sagging to the ground to make his hideout's walls. No grass grew under there, and it felt secret and safe. He peered out from the cool shadows at various adults walking dogs and the neighbor's Christmas decorations until a blue sedan pulled into the driveway across the street. The kids were the right age to play with, but they were both girls. The parents were more or less ignored by the old couple who came outside to hug their grandkids.

He liked his secret spot beneath the magnolia tree where he would hide and play in the afternoons while the adults would sit indoors and speak softly or nap in easy chairs in front of the TV, probably tuned to something boring like golf or a cooking show that teaches people to jazz up something out of a can. He was too young when his grandfather died to remember him, but there was a picture of the kind-eyed old man on top of a cabinet in the hallway next to a cut-glass bowl full of hard butterscotch candies. He would take a little handful of the candies when he thought no one was looking, but they were, but he was allowed to have them, so the adults just smiled and said nothing.

So he stood in the shade beneath the enormous magnolia tree sucking on stolen butterscotch candies and pretending his grandfather was beside him doing the same, hunched and happy, watching the little girls across the street play and giggling at a woman power walking in a visor with her tiny, sweater-wearing dogs.

Last weekend, I hitched a ride up to Oklahoma to help my friend Mauricio and his family with the grape harvest at Gray Fox Vineyard, the name of a few acres behind his parents’ house where a dozen or so rows of vines have been growing for the last thirteen years. They’ve since acquired more land and plan to build a winery next year, but, for now, they make a little wine for friends and family and sell juice to other local wine makers.

Mauricio and I woke at 6:00 a.m. in his in-laws’ house in Piedmont, Oklahoma. As a freelancer, I don’t see a lot of sunrises—not complaining, oh ye of little PTO—but that morning’s was a good ‘un. We got McDonald’s coffee and drove a few miles away to his parents’ house and vineyard. It was only after Mauricio and Lacie met in Dallas that they discovered their parents live maybe ten minutes away from each other.

Mauricio’s brother, Oscar, was already up and about. The grass was dewy, and the brothers were nice enough to find a pair of rubber boots that fit me. I got a quick rundown of what bunches to harvest and what to let alone on the vines, and we were off to the races.

The white grape varieties hadn’t done very well that year, but there was a good crop of a red grape variety called Norton. I hadn’t heard of it before, but apparently it’s big in Virginia. I was able to try some wine Maux’s dad made in 2015, and it gave me a strong sense memory of camping in the redwoods in California. I know practically nothing about wine, but I know I liked that.

There were a good number of people helping, and I think we were done by noon, which was good because it had begun to drizzle. Maux’s dad grilled hamburgers, and we rested and ate under the carport. All in all, a great experience. It was fun trying something new, and it’s been far too long since I’ve done any manual labor. Cheers to the Cremer family and the future of Gray Fox Vineyard.

Before I even opened the curtains this morning, I found out that Anthony Bourdain was dead. I thought, "In his sixties, former drug addict – that's not a huge surprise." But then the next paragraph said that he killed himself. Hung in a hotel room in France while his best friend was in the next room.

I can't know and won't bother speculating on what led to his decision, but it's made me incredibly sad. I certainly didn't admire everything about him, but his shows were always my favorites. I wear light jeans and sand-colored Clarks because of him. He embodied so many of the things I love: food, adventure and travel, combined with a wary eye toward government/authority and how people are treated. And zero tolerance for pretense.

But aside from liking his work, Anthony Bourdain had become something of a strange benchmark for me. For years, especially when I was doing worse than I am now, I would look to him as proof that things can get better. He didn't publish his first book until in his forties, and the TV shows, travel, subsequent books and success all came later.

He seemed to be at his happiest, healthiest and most successful as he approached 60, which left my 33-year-old self feeling not quite so bad for having failed to accomplish much of anything yet. I'm glad I didn't peak in high school, but Anthony Bourdain was evidence that one could peak much later in life, and maybe that was going to be me. It was at least some vague thing to look forward to.

But then he hangs himself and that idea goes out the window.

Bourdain's death comes only a few weeks after the lead singer of one of my favorite bands killed himself in the place and manner he had described in a song ten years earlier. Scott Hutchison of the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit sang in the song, "Floating in the Forth":

Both of these men were vocal about their atheism, which makes their deaths all the sadder and perhaps even explains their decision. If this world is all there is, there really is no hope. At the same time, I recently encountered someone who said, in effect, that no Christian should ever be depressed. I had to restrain myself from punching him in the face.

I've said in other places that I was severely depressed and socially anxious from age 14 to age 30. While "severe" is admittedly my own self-diagnosis, I think that spending half your life hating yourself, feeling worthless and wishing you were dead surely must qualify.

The best way for me to describe what it was like living with the thought of suicide is like living with a loaded gun sitting out on a side table. Some days, I was so used to it being there that I could walk past without taking any special notice. Other days, I'd sit and stare at it to the exclusion of everything else. But it was always there. And I was a Christian.

"God loves you." That's hard to feel, easy to forget and often hard to believe.

"God has a plan for you." That plan appears to be that I'm an extra in a movie about suffering.

"Things will get better." There's no guarantee of that, even inside Christendom.

God healed me of depression about two and a half years ago, and even being not-so-distantly removed from it, it's amazing to look back on the insanity of how I felt and thought day to day. It's just lies. The problem is that, in that state, those lies are so easy to believe that they look just like truth, and truth is so very hard to believe that it isn't good for anything.

I don't know. This isn't an obituary or essay; I'm just verbally processing. The people I would normally talk to about this are either busy or out of the country. I'm sad people kill themselves. I'm sad some people are so desperate to believe that the world is an accident with no meaning simply because they'd rather play in the street than live with rules. I'm sad that one of my favorite shows and one of my favorite bands are done. And it doesn't help that I just finished reading Ecclesiastes.

I can't speak for everyone, but I think suicide hotlines are a feeble solution. I, myself, can do the correct thing here and offer to be an ear to struggling people—and I am, and I want to be—but that's not really the point. The point is that today has been a vivid reminder of what hopelessness feels like, and I'm afraid of how much stronger it appears to be than hope. A lie, but one well disguised.

Times are tough when heaven is the only thing you have to look forward to. But it's something. And it's strong. And I pray in all earnestness that it comes soon.

I'm currently reading (and thoroughly enjoying) the late Jim Harrison's "The Raw and the Cooked," an excellent book of essays on food, the outdoors and being a working writer, among other things. This particular sentence not only struck me as the kind of dieting advice I can get behind, but it rang like a bell on a deeper life-level as well.

I'm enthusiastic about good food, which is why I'm terrible at losing weight. But rather than foregoing one for the other, I'd much rather live a more physical life and burn the good stuff away. For example, yesterday I bookended some good-not-great Vietnamese food with a one-hour walk and a two-mile run. Maybe I could find a part-time job in manual labor...

But on to the deeper level. I realize this phrase could be viewed as simply a less-trite version of "Work hard, play hard," which is really nothing more than a marketing ploy that encourages people to pretend they do the former to excuse doing the latter. I don't think that does Mr. Harrison justice. For one thing, he really was just talking about food. "Either trim [the fat] or skip trimming," he says.

I recently returned from yet another 3,000-mile-or-so road trip, this time more or less driving a lasso around the American Rockies. That's more than enough road to get some thinking done, although conclusions often don't take shape until I'm back, the car is washed and vacuumed, and the proverbial dust has settled.

I'd left feeling a near-desperate need to be alone and recharge so that I could hopefully come back and be around other humans without the scowl-and-growl disposition that e'er threatens to become permanent with me. Instead, I came back feeling more like the cowboy or farmer that I've never actually been in the first place. More stoic. More serious. More ready to work.

I'm doing surprisingly well at the fourteen-month mark as a freelance writer and photographer, myself being the surprised one. Mostly because it was an act of desperation rather than a career choice. After failing to get hired on at a different ad agency in Dallas, even being unemployed was better than continuing to drag myself down the alley each day to that swamp of negativity, the soundtrack of which was the ringing in the ears one gets in a silent, crowded waiting room.

So I jumped. And after the sheer joy of being rid of that foul place subsided a bit, I made a little effort here and there to promote myself but mostly just took the work that came to me. A few times that work was trips to foreign countries, which was fantastically lucky, but mostly it was just writing with a lot of free time mixed in rather than a lot of dead time stuck at a desk. And so it continued until the phrase:

"Eat the delicious fat and take a ten-mile walk."

If I want to travel more, and I do – a lot more, I have to work harder to pay for it. And if I have to work harder, which I want to do anyway, why not do the kind of work I actually enjoy? Daydream passion projects that really are exciting, viable ideas have sat too long on the shelf, getting fat with good intentions. But that's on me, and it's high time to get going.

"Living life to the fullest" recruits no shortage of disciples who think it means not much more than getting drunk at a friend's house after telling her parents she's spending the night at a different friend's house. Or whatever the adult version of that is. Getting drunk on boats, probably.

And then "work hard, play hard" is too mistreated to mean anything real anymore, so I'll chant this mantra instead. More adventures. Larger amounts of more challenging work. More asking for the things I want. More persistence in the asking. There are specifics to all of these ideas written in notebooks that you, dear reader, have no current use for, but they're important. Without specifics, this is just a weird bumper sticker.

"Why am I writing this?" I have to ask myself, here at the end. Because I want to, I suppose. Chuck Close said inspiration is for amateurs, so I'll spare you the self-indulgence of thinking I could do that for you. Maybe it's public accountability. Or a warning that I may soon ask you for something. More likely, I'm just in the middle of reading good writing that made me feel like writing something myself.